Getting your website ranking as high as possible with major search engines is crucial for your business. It also gives you winning advantage against your competition. We will discuss in this article several factors that contribute to how high you can go on a search engine query result.

Please realize there is no such thing as a magic silver bullet that will vault you to the top of the search engines – if there were, everyone would know it, they would do it, and it would cease to work because of saturation.

Several strategies contribute to this, as you can see from the following. First, we will discuss the general strategies and techniques used with all major search engine. Then we will discuss the specific the specifics of what is currently working on each of the major search engines.

Part One : General Guidelines

Choosing your domain name :

One of the most basic, yet critically important, strategies is to use your best keywords in your domain address. An example would look like…

http://www.laptopshome.com
http://www.notebooksforsale.com

The reason for doing this is because search engines and directories assume the domain to be relevant to the keyword. It’s something that, in practicality, can’t be faked.

Getting your keywords into your domain name is strategically critical and chances are it will only become even more important in the future. Remember, by registering all possible keyword combination domain names you can think of you not only have them available to your company when needed but you’ve also prevented your competition from securing them and using them against you.

If your company name is your domain name, then that’s fine but you should still register all relevant keyword-rich domain names pertaining to your goods and services. This will give you the option of setting up specialized sites that place your services into the paths of the engines and directories.

Getting Your Web Page Titles Right :

This is all about your pages <TITLE> tag. Note in mind that Title is the most important aspect of web page design in respects to scoring well on most search engines.

Always make sure every word in your title is one that is likely to be used by a person when doing a keyword search for your business or service. AND, keep in mind that unless the name of your business is prominently recognized or likely to be used in a keyword search – something like “SONY cameras”, it does NOT belong in the Title tags.

Keyword Selection Techniques :

Make a list of every possible search word (keyword) and search phrase (keyphrase) that your potential customers
might use when looking for your information, product or service. Remember to include synonyms as well as the common misspellings of your keywords and pay particular attention to noun phrases. Next, use these keywords and keyphrases to find your competition on the top search engines.

Keyword Relevancy :

Simply put, your keywords must be relevant to the contents, or theme of your web page.

Keyword Density :

By this I mean the number of times your keyword(s) appear in relation to the other words on your web page. Theoretically, a webpage that said only “Chicago” verses the “Eat at Chicago’s…” page would be given a higher score for the keyword Chicago due to a higher keyword density.

Description Meta Tag :

The meta description tag is used by many engines as the summary for your site when listed in the search results. It’s what tells a real person whether or not your site is relevant to their search. You should view it as a sales presentation for your link. If the meta description tag entices the searcher they will, theoretically, click your link and visit your site. Obviously that’s the purpose for being listed in the search engine in the first place.

Most search engines place a limit on the number of characters that a meta tag can contain. Once the limit is reached they typically ignore the rest of the tag contents. In general, 250 characters – including spaces and commas – is a good rule of thumb that falls within the guidelines of most engines.

*Google has also released official builds of Google Chrome for Linux and Mac OS X (see update below). If you are looking to install Chrome on a USB stick, check out Portable Google Chrome.

The Google Browser port, known as Crossover Chromium, is available for download on Mac OS X as a native Mac .dmg file or on Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse, etc. as standard Linux packages.

Google Chrome for Mac OS X- Screenshot

Google Chrome on Linux – Screenshot

Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.

How to Install Google Browser on Mac / Linux

Mac users can simply drag the Chromium .dmg file into their Applications folder. Linux users should use the appropriate tools for their respective Linux distributions to unpack the installer package. Google Chrome on Linux is available for both 32bit and 64bit versions.

If you installed Google Chrome on Linux using the .deb package, you can uninstall the Google Browser using the Synaptic package manager or via the following command – sudo aptitude purge cxchromium

Google Chrome for Mac & Linux – Official Builds

Update: The official builds of Google Chromium are now available for Linux and Mac here. The interface and features of Chromium for Mac OS X are similar to that of Chrome for Windows but it’s a developer release and not very stable yet.

Hotmail experienced a service outage this week, as countless Hotmail.com customers were unable to access their email due to a server going down. Users said they were receiving a “Server is too busy” message when they tried to log into Hotmail, which has more than 375 million active users worldwide, according to Microsoft.

The Twitter reports were so widespread that Microsoft even sent out a message on its own WindowsLive Twitter feed letting people know it was aware of the outage, and then again when the outage was repaired.

This was the second outage for a major online e-mail service this week. On Monday, Google’s Gmail service went down for as many as 24 to 36 hours for some users.

For Microsoft and Google, which are competing to bring more Web-based services to consumers and businesses, e-mail has been a proving ground for how many users their online services can support. Outages raise questions about the ability of those companies and other online service providers to maintain a consistent quality of service for end users.

Google Sitemaps allows the webmaster to help Google index their pages optimally. The GSiteCrawler will help you generate the best Google Sitemap file for your website. The GSiteCrawler uses different ways to find all the pages in your website and can generate all sorts of files, statistics and more. The sitemaps file format has lately been also adapted by Yahoo! – even MSN/Live.com is pledging it’s support.

The GSiteCrawler is available for free and runs under Windows – all you need is an internet connection and the desire to make the most out of your website!

Following below simple steps, you will be able to install and run GSiteCrawler on your linux box :

1. Add the Wine repository to your system and update to latest wine release.
Refer to your system documentation to find out how to locate and add a new repository.

Windows users can just download and install the program directly, but MS Windows Vista users have to take the following in consideration :

You must install and run the program as administrator.
Go to the folder where you installed it, right click the executable GSiteCrawler.exe and select Properties.
Go to the Compatibility tab and check the box near the bottom to Run as administrator.
Do the same thing for the program to compress the database DbCompress.exe. And the uninstaller Unwise.exe for good measure.
You will also face the typical Vista prompt “Are you sure you want to run …”.